On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Don Ward <don2387w...@sprynet.com> wrote:
> A worrisome (to me) issue with the volk library is the use of
> posix_memalign() in the qa tests. The worry is:
>
> * posix_memalign() will never work on Windows with Microsoft's runtime
> library *
>
> That means that code that uses posix_memalign won't work on Windows with
> MinGW or Microsoft native compilers. (The problem is not that memory
> alignment is difficult; it is simply that there is no memory-aligned version
> of malloc() in the Microsoft API that works with free().)
>
> At present, posix_memalign is used in GNU Radio in machine-dependent code
> (gcell, altivec, and arm7) and in the volk qa tests. If we can replace it
> in volk and avoid its spread, we can continue to use GNU Radio on Windows.
>
> One option is to use something like malloc16Align/free16Align (in
> malloc16.{h,c}) in gnuradio-core. Can we structure the code to make this
> available in volk, and anywhere else it is needed? We can add a version to
> do more general alignment if needed. Would it help to wrap aligned buffers
> in a C++ class to make it easier to catch errors (such as using free() on a
> malloc16Align() buffer)?
>
> Note that simply enhancing our own missing/posix_memalign function using
> _mingw_aligned_malloc() or Microsofts's _aligned_malloc() won't work because
> memory allocated with those cannot be released with free().
>
> Trying not to cause too much trouble,
>
> -- Don W.
>
Thanks for bringing this up. I'll look into it and we'll try to figure out a
general solution for all platforms involved.
Tom
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